Friday, May 30, 2008

MITO has promoted the transfer of the RAI Studio of Musical Phonology at the Museum of Musical Instruments in Milan to make its equipment and electronic archives available to the public.The priceless musical heritage and technology is for the first time assembled and exhibited in its entirety in a museum.Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono's experimental music will live again in their original environment and an innovative digital library will disclose its contents.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Silence a boundary notion, a conceptual ideal, an aural vanishing point. Saying something about silence equals loosing it. Being silent is impossible may it include to cease living. Many words have been uttered to grasp this paradox.

There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.

No Silence exists, that is not pregnant with sound.

Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. - John Cage

Rik Ede is the founder and managing director of GAMESOUND Ltd. Rik has been making music for games for over 18 years, 10 of which have been spent creating music in 5.1 (and more recently 7.1) surround sound.Rik is considered to be the world’s leading authority on surround sound in games having spent 5 years working for Dolby as 5.1 evangelist, 2 years as a consultant to DTS and more recently Rik has just finished a 2 year stint as the PLAYSTATION® 3 surround consultant to Sony's R&D group.

Norwegian artist Maia Urstad, created this installation, "Wall of Sound" out of hundreds of CD players stacked in the same pattern of the old stone fences between farms in Norway. Substituting heavy stones for techno-garbage, the artist made a point of creating a modern take on the reuse of electronic waste for infrastructure improvements.

Milan/Rome based Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi are sound artists whose work spans from digital music to electro acoustic improvisation.Unidentified Sound Object is born from the desire to discover new paths and non-linear narrative strategies in both aural and visual domains. U.S.O. Project is a continuing evolving organism.

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Selfish is Giovanni Antignano. Italian video artist and visual designer. His research ranges from video art to visuals and live performance. His live sets are centralized on an obsessive elaboration of the video loop, where the action is continuously replied and stratified until it reaches its fulfilment. From the end of the nineties until today he has been a member of minor and important collectives.He took part to several national and international meetings and festivals (VideoMinuto, Station to Station, Polietilene 2.0, Fabbrica Europa, MAF05 Bangkok, Israeli Digital Lab, Weast Coast Nu Music Electronic Art, Biennal of Electronic Art Perth, MUV...). He also curated the "What' s next? 2006" festival dedicated to audio/video performances. During the past years Selfish collaborated or performed with Milanese, Fenin, Marco Parente, Marco Messina (99 Posse), Lorenzo Brusci, Timet, Dino Bramanti, David Cossin, Larry Heard, Ether, Xiangxing, Dj Shantel, among the others.He's the founder, in 2006, of Zerofeedback videolabel.

It is sixty years since Pierre Schaeffer started "musique concrète" in Paris. Does it make any sense to go on speaking of concrete music today? Who are the composers who perform it? A reply to these two questions comes from the two musical encounters of Tempo Reale, encounters headed by two important composers from the GRM of Paris, the institution founded by Schaeffer himself.

Daniel Teruggi will lead the listeners in a journey through the present day and the history of a musical genre which has had no mean influence on contemporary languages. Two kinds of historical and present-day sound experiences are therefore compared in a technological-musical context that is particularly refined, the Studio C of the RAI in Tuscany.

A moment dedicated to artistic experimentation, to the exploration of non-conventional expressive languages and to the research on new technologies. An occasion for some among the most interesting international artists to investigate the creative and communicative potential of music, video art, sound design and electronics/electronic arts in synergy.

From May 22nd to 25th the most representative places of Milan will be transformed through performances and installations from international artists. audiovisiva 5.0 penetrates the urban tissue, flows through the streets and the squares, takes museums, antique buildings, private villas and underground garages as its milestones while turning the city into one wide stage.

Saturday, May 03, 2008

Film dialog, taken from subtitle files, defines movement and appearance of particles that leave traces on the screen. Smoky watercolor drawings emerge from each movies individual frequency of spoken words and their letters.

How it works

Several particles move across the screen according to their individual acceleration and velocity values. Each particle is fed a letter of the current displayed movie dialog. The amount of active particles is defined by the amount of letters in the subtitle line. The letter influences the particles movement dynamics by adjusting the acceleration value into a calculated direction and changes its size by defining a growing or shrinking rate. Lowercase consonant letters are relocated to the position of the word's starting letter, while lowercase vocal letters bend their path towards the direction of the word's starting letter.

This fixed set of conditions lacks random actions and therefore causes the exact same drawing if run twice. Yet the applet allows the user to manipulate the drawing by either stopping the dialog replay or changing the playing speed. By hitting the pause button, the movie stops and the particles remain with the letter the have been fed right before. This allows the particles to follow their initiated pathways without constantly changing pace and direction.

Movies that are defined by rapid successions of spoken dialog produce drawings that consist mostly of black ink blobs that grow together, as the particles are constantly reset with new parameters. Movies that show long silent pauses between scenes gives particles more time to produce long lines and curves. By altering the replay speed of the movie, size and dynamic of the emerging drawings can be controlled.

Mix magazine takes you behind the scenes to Skywalker Ranch, in this exclusive interview with sound re-recording mixer Chris Boyes about the challenges of bringing this classic Marvel superhero to the big screen.

This conference explores practices of visual and aural culture in painting, photography, film, architecture, performance, music, and new media as world-making—how they create human worlds of sensation, knowledge, and action. The traditions addressed range from 19th-century Europe and 20th-century America to the medieval Islamic world, the transnational Caribbean, and contemporary India. Speakers aim to confront theories of world-making with the diversity of world art traditions. It seems obvious that art makes many different worlds. How do they interrelate and change? Are interpre- tations limited to individual cultures, or do they offer resources for comparisons among traditions? What world is involved in “world art”?

Thursday, May 01, 2008

The Auralex Interactive Kit Calculator is a nice web-app that allows you to quickly find the ideal complete treatment system to solve the sound control requirements of any standard rectangular room (registration required).